Malta

Luke's own word is Melita, and two independent lines of evidence confirm modern Malta. An inscription found on the island gives a local Roman knight the title first man of the Melitans, in Greek and in Latin, the exact rank Luke gives Publius when he calls him the chief official of the island. Separately, James Smith's nineteenth-century study of the winds, currents and soundings recorded in Acts 27 traces the ship's drift and lands it at Malta on its own terms, without relying on the island's name at all.

Both verdicts are the islanders' own pagan reasoning, stated plainly by Luke rather than endorsed by him. First they assumed the viper was Justice catching a guilty man who had escaped the sea; when nothing happened to him, they swung to the opposite extreme. Paul never claims either title for himself.

Publius held the title chief official of the island, confirmed by inscriptions naming that exact office on Malta. He hosted the shipwrecked company for three days, and Paul repaid the hospitality by praying for his father, who was healed of fever and dysentery. Afterward the rest of the island's sick came and were healed too.

The voyage was already dangerous before the storm hit, because it was sailing after the close of the safe season. Once wrecked, the company had no choice but to wait through the winter months for a ship willing to risk the crossing to Rome again in spring.

No. Luke states plainly that all 276 people aboard reached land safely, some swimming and the rest carried in on planks and broken pieces of the ship, exactly as the angel had promised Paul in the night.

In the 1730s the Croatian scholar Ignjat Đurđević argued that Luke's Melita was Mljet, an island in the Adriatic off the Dalmatian coast, not the Mediterranean island now called Malta. His case rested on medieval sources that had used the same name for Mljet. Most readers today hold that Mljet does not fit the rest of the voyage: after leaving the island, Paul's ship sailed on to Syracuse in Sicily and then to Rhegium and Puteoli on the Italian coast, a route that fits a landing at Malta far better than one far north in the Adriatic. Within Malta itself, a bay on the island's north coast has carried the name St Paul's Bay since at least the twelfth century, and a local tradition naming it the exact spot of the landing is traced to a priest in the 1500s. This page names both traditions and does not choose a precise beach for the wreck beyond what Luke himself records.